


Belated Music

by Himring



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cross-cultural, F/M, Inspired by Novel, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:42:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26903089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Himring/pseuds/Himring
Summary: Their love was impossible to begin with.Events beyond their control drove them even further apart and shattered their lives.Despite all that, what was between them will forge an alliance that brings the first glimmerings of hope to both their peoples at the lowest point in their history.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	Belated Music

**Author's Note:**

> Influenced by JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion and Ursula Le Guin's Hainish stories.  
> Your choice whether you want to read it as fantasy or soft science fiction.
> 
> Written back in 2009, but previously only posted to a locked journal.

They were outcasts, the ragged remains of a cluster of aristocratic families, now mercilessly hunted by the sinister empire that had replaced their rule. It was their own betrayals as much as others’ that had caused their downfall; not all of them chose to remember that. Inheritors of a culture that they had believed placed them high above their former subjects, they were now reduced to depending again and again on the willing aid of these smaller, shorter-lived people. It was not always forthcoming. Many were simply too afraid, but in the eyes of others with longer memories and long-held grudges they were simply the less cruel former conquerors, and neither duty nor gratitude was due to them. Their days were hard. They survived by being difficult to find, but when chance offered, the hunted still became the hunters.

It was autumn. The leaves were turning from green to yellow to brown; a sharp wind whipped them off the branches of the trees and past their faces, as they stealthily advanced through the forest. Some way ahead of their advance scouts, a scream rang out, followed by shouts and noises of violent movement. They halted. The scouts went on and quickly returned. Enemy troops attacking Andoli, they reported, few enough to be dealt with. They gripped their weapons tighter and fanned out in a well-practised manoeuvre.   
  
By the time they had finished surrounding the clearing, it had become clear that the Andoli were putting up a fight, but also, unsurprisingly, that they were in deep trouble. As Aytö emerged from behind a bush, he saw a small figure fly through the air and hit the broad trunk of an oak with a vicious crack. He did not hesitate, but gave the signal to attack. A volley of well-aimed arrows sped across the clearing. Swords and daggers took care of the rest. Soon there were no enemy soldiers left alive; the attacked Andoli were eyeing their rescuers over their sprawling corpses, panting and dishevelled—bleeding, some of them.  
  
“My lord Aytö,” gasped one, astonished, and the others froze like startled deer.  
  
Wearily, Aytö tasted the familiar humiliation, but after a moment realized that this time their stunned silence signified more than the usual reaction to seeing him reduced in this way from lording it over them, seated on his towering charger, decked out in silk and brocades—reduced to skulking in the wilderness in shabby, mended clothes.  
  
“We have found you, finally”, the man breathed, but his gaze had left Aytö, he saw. He seemed to be peering at the big oak on the other side of the clearing.

“I’d say we found you”, said Aytö’s sister sardonically. She bent to rip a corner off the cloak of a fallen soldier and carefully wiped the blood off her dagger. She went on polishing it and frowned at the man who had spoken. “You were looking for us, were you?”  
  
Suddenly her jaw tightened, her nostrils flared, and her eyes darted into the green depths beyond, scenting a trap. Aytö gave a slightly impatient grunt and walked over to the foot of the oak, following the trajectory of the flight he now recalled having seen as the skirmish began. There was a little dark heap lying on the ground beneath.  
  
Behind him, his sister barked: “Where do you think you’re going?”  
  
“My lady...” the man answered her, “she’s hurt...”   
  
Aytö stopped. The man darted past him, paused, and carefully lifted the body, turning it. “My lady, my lady!” he said. “It’s my lord Aytö. He’s here!”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Aytö walked the last few steps to the oak and knelt down. Reclining half against the oak roots, half against the shoulder of her supporter, lay a short, dumpy woman. Her face was heavily lined, her hair iron-grey. She seemed to have trouble focussing, began to shake her head as if to clear it, but stopped with a sharp inhalation and a grimace of pain. Her supporter gave a suppressed exclamation of distress. The woman screwed her eyes together, took a slow breath, and opened them again cautiously. This time, she saw Aytö.   
  
“My lord Aytö” she said, creakily. She fell silent again. Then her voice came more strongly. “My lord—I was seeking you... I was seeking you to tell you... To tell you that I did not know what they were planning, my father and my cousin...”  
  
Aytö’s sister, who had followed them across the clearing, laughed. There was a hysterical edge to her laughter, almost like a scream. “As if anyone had thought she did know... mooning around in corners...making calf’s eyes at you, full of hopeless longing!”  
  
“Hold your tongue!” said Aytö heavily. He was not sure whether the woman before him had heard and understood his sister or not. Her gaze had not wavered from his face. He spoke to her, steadily, trying not to betray any emotion except sincerity. “I believe you. I am sure you had no idea what they were planning.”  
  
She went on looking at him. He said nothing else. She studied his face, looked briefly at her supporter, who was bending over her anxiously, and smiled ruefully. “We are none of us as young as we were when we left the castle”, she said. “I must ask you to take us under your protection.” Her supporter made an involuntary motion of protest, swiftly stilled. She ignored it.  
  
“I place you under my protection”, said Aytö. He heard his sister give a small snort. He got up and walked away.  
  
“Thank you”, the woman said behind him.

Aytö’s people had heard him make his promise and took action without further instructions. His surgeon bound the wounds of her guards—two, it turned out, had died right at the beginning of the attack—and checked her own hurts. Others supplied food and other wants, as far at it was within their means. They removed most of the bags from the back of a pack pony, so she could perch on it. The Andoli who had spoken, clearly the captain of her guards, lifted her up and went on supporting her so that she did not topple off. Aytö saw it out of the corner of his eye. He pretended to pay no attention, however, discussing their further movements with his sister and his other relatives in low voices.  
  
It would not do to linger here. Although even Aytö’s sister no longer suspected an ambush, the pile of corpses in the clearing might attract the attention of more than scavengers. Moreover, they did not know whether either the attackers or their victims might have been followed. They dragged the dead bodies into the bushes so that they would be less visible.

As soon as possible, and even more carefully, they set off again. By the end of the day, they had put a considerable distance between themselves and the clearing. It had taken a lot out of the Andoli guards, who had suffered considerably more in the fight than Aytö’s people had. Moreover, they had shorter legs and, as the woman had said, they were none of them young, none as old as her, certainly, but tending well into middle age. She herself leant in the saddle, more unconscious than not, supported to the right and left by two others of her guards, who had taken over after a couple of hours.  
  
When they realized that they seemed to be stopping for the night, her guards lowered her down to the ground, one of them bedding her head across his thighs. The small group of Andoli huddled around her. Several of Aytö’s people stood regarding them from a distance, some sceptically, some rather resentfully. Aytö spoke sharply to them and they quickly turned away and started setting up camp as usual. The Andoli observed this and began taking their own measures, taking care to keep a small distance to the side of the larger camp. Aytö looked for the surgeon, found him, and quietly asked him a question. The surgeon shook his head, went over to the Andoli woman and began checking her over again.

In the morning, he had another look at her and then came to Aytö and said: “I’m sure of it now. It’s not just concussion. There are other injuries and internal bleeding. If we were still at the castle, maybe I could do something... but maybe not, she is old and exhausted and I was never as proficient in Andoli physiology... It’s not covered in the textbooks...” Aytö showed no visible reaction, but the surgeon winced. “I’m sorry,” he said, “all I can do at this point is give her something to ease the pain.”  
  
“The pain?” asked Aytö. “Is she conscious and awake?”  
  
“She is”, said the surgeon.  
  
“You know exactly how much to give her?”  
  
“Yes, I do know that”, said the surgeon and, then a little angrily: “I had made notes. I was going to write the first textbook... Too little, too late...” Aytö put his hand on his shoulder.

He waited a little and waited a little more, giving the drug time to work, he thought. Then he walked across the brief distance from the main camp to where the Andoli had settled. She was lying in the middle, under the sheltering branches of a bush, on a pile of blankets and cloaks. Her people were hovering closely around her, but all backed away when Aytö came up, leaving them a little space for privacy.  
  
She looked at him and smiled. “He told you I was dying,” she said, “and so you have come to talk to me.”  
  
“Yes”, Aytö admitted. “Are you in pain?” he asked. “He said he knew how much to give you...”  
  
“He’s a good man”, she said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

There was a brief silence. “I should have guessed what they were planning ,” she said then, “but the possibility never crossed my mind. I knew they did not love you, my lord, but I don’t know why they thought that betrayal would gain them anything but what they got. They killed my cousin, you know, the first time he raised his voice in protest against what they did. You will have heard that, I think. My father is thoroughly cowed now —no, he must be dead, too, by now, surely...”  
  
“He is,” said Aytö. “You didn’t know?”   
  
“He was still alive when we left. We were looking for you for a long time...”  
  
“I’m sorry”, he said.  
  
“Don’t be”, she said. “I took comfort from it. If we couldn’t find you, my lord, then maybe the enemy couldn’t find you either—and they didn’t!” She smiled with something almost like triumph, but nearly at once the smile was replaced by a great sadness. “We discovered we were more enslaved than we had ever been”, she said. “Our only reward for treachery was to serve as slave-masters, inflicting on others what they inflicted on us. It would be too much to ask you to pity us...”  
  
“But I do,” Aytö said. She regarded him with surprise. “I do”, he repeated, with complete conviction. Without looking up, he heard a murmur pass around the Andoli guards. Aytö’s own people, who had been watching surreptitiously from the other side of the divide, took notice and edged closer.

The Andoli woman sighed and took a deep, deep breath, too deep, for clearly it hurt beyond the power of the drug to dull the pain. For a moment she lay still, with closed eyes. When she opened them again, she was smiling again. “In the old days,” she said, “I would have asked permission to await you on the Other Side as your dog. But I know your people do not believe in such things. You believe in the Tenth Choir, don’t you?—that you will join in the Great Music of the Heavens. Do you think Andoli will be allowed to join in, too? You have never much liked our style of singing!”

Aytö started back. “Woman,” he exclaimed, “are you deaf and blind? Do you not know that it was I who sacked Andoleyn? I razed the city to the ground! And you talk to me about the Heavens?”  
  
Her eyes widened. “I had heard that,” she said. “I have also heard why you did it.”  
  
At that, he abruptly lost control, after all those years, and started shouting—shouted at her: “Does it matter why I did it? Does it matter!” “God”, he thought, “next thing, I’ll be hitting little children. No—no, I’ve done all that and much worse already—by proxy—long ago.”

They stared at each other. Aytö’s sister had come up behind him, but they never noticed her.  
  
“Maybe I have failed you even worse than I knew,” the Andoli woman said slowly. “In truth, I did not need your lore masters to tell me about the Great Music. Whenever I looked at you, I could hear it myself. It was so loud it deafened me, it overwhelmed me—my head rang with it, I could not feel my hands or feet, I did not know who I was anymore... It terrified me. It never occurred to me that you could not hear it yourself.” She tried to get her elbows underneath her to prop herself up.   
  
“Don’t,” said Aytö, his voice still ugly with emotion in his own ears. But she persisted and, unwillingly, he reached out and grasped her shoulders with his outstretched arms, holding her up so that she might not hurt herself any worse.  
  
“Aytö,” she gasped, addressing him by his name rather than his title for the first time in her life, “that music was not made only to be silenced—not by the enemy, not by your kin, not by your own hands.” Her eyes were blazing. His arms trembled. “I will not ask your permission—” she whispered, “I will not ask your lore masters’ permission. I will not ask permission from God himself! I will stand on the steps to the Tenth Choir and await you—and when you come, I will call out: ‘Aytö has come! Aytö is here!’”  
  
A great shudder ran through her and up his wrists. He seemed to need all his strength to hold up that slight body. A small cry tore out of him, ripping his tight vocal cords: “Alauvë! Alauvë!”  
  
She smiled at him once more, now blind with light, and said: “Do not be afraid—I will know you.” A trickle of blood ran out of the corner of her mouth, and she collapsed forward onto his chest, as his elbows gave way. Another, much smaller shudder ran through her, and then she was still. He took up her wrist and found no pulse.

“You gave her a heart name”, said Aytö’s sister, stunned. “You named her!”  
  
“When would I have named her?” said Aytö numbly. “She hung around mooning in dark corners, as you said, staring at me, eyes full of fear and longing, it seemed. I tried to set her at ease, talk to her. But that appeared to make her more afraid of me, not less. I concluded that maybe her eyes saw deeper, that she saw how much there was to be afraid of...” He smiled bitterly. “I was wrong, it seems.”

The Andoli captain cleared his throat harshly. Aytö looked at him and the Andoli took a step backwards, but jerked up his chin in defiance.   
  
“You question the courage and the judgement of my lady”, he said fiercely. “It is true— she was always a quiet one, more interested in lore than in the workings of power. But when we were in despair—not even admitting to ourselves how helpless we felt, not even daring to think how much it tormented us to torment our own kind—it was she who came up to me and said: ‘There is no more to be done here.’ And when I did not understand right away, she added: ‘We must leave.’ I gathered the others and we got her out of the castle and into the wild. It was a hard life, but we were free. It was even harder on her, being older than us and not trained, but she never uttered a word of complaint or regret. Although she went on blaming herself for the past, we felt she had freed us of the taint...” He stopped. His features contorted themselves, but he did not weep. “It is true that our journey has brought us here, where we are not welcome. We will bury her and leave.”

“Ah, no!” said Aytö, distressed. “She was a lady of great honour. Her only fault, if it can be called a fault, was too much generosity. She had too good an opinion of me. The precious gift she intended for me has slipped through my fingers... but she bequeathed you to me, as well—and I could not forgive myself, if you, too, slipped through my fingers. Please overlook any unkindness or rudeness that I or my people have offered you; it shall not happen again.” The Andoli captain looked thunderstruck—and suspicious. Aytö thought that that speech, completely unpremeditated as it was, had somehow come out sounding too polished, as if he had rehearsed it.

He tried again. “You were her cousin, were you not? Is not your name Essandol?”  
  
“Only a very distant cousin”, said the Andoli captain uncertainly.  
  
“I will claim you as my cousin now, if you will permit it, Essandol,” said Aytö. The Andoli guard behind Essandol gave a stifled gasp. “Will you stay?” asked Aytö.   
  
Essandol looked utterly incredulous. He opened his mouth; then his gaze drifted down from Aytö’s face to his chest. Aytö looked down and discovered that, while he was speaking to Essandol, his arms had of their own accord wrapped themselves around the dead woman’s body. He was cradling the lady of the Andoli tenderly against himself like a child. His cheeks flushed hotly. Essandol’s expression cleared. “We will stay”, he said. Neither of them guessed at that moment that this was a turning point in the history of both their peoples.

Aytö nodded, relieved, and bent to ease the body down, but stopped in mid-motion and looked up at his sister. He had made his unheard-of appeal to Essandol without a second thought, committing her as much as himself, but now a note of pleading crept into his voice. “They age so much more quickly than we,” he said, subdued. “It is like being forced to watch your family live in a house that is sliding over a cliff, but...”

His sister knelt down beside him. She took a frayed silken handkerchief from her pouch and dabbed gently at the blood on the dead woman’s mouth and chin. “You heart-named her,” she said, half under her breath. “And I heard her acknowledge it. Who are you to say that she was wrong? Maybe it is true and your Alauvë will meet you on the steps of the Tenth Choir.”

This was almost shocking—he had not been sure his sister still believed in the Heavens, let alone Heavens that admitted Andoli. He himself had firmly believed in Hell only because he so self-evidently deserved it. Puzzlingly, it was less easy to be sure he was irrevocably damned, here, now, hugging Alauvë to his chest. Why was that, when he had so signally failed to cherish and protect her?

“I thought you hated them,” he said.  
  
“That”, said his sister, “was yesterday.” She went on dabbing, trying to soak up every last particle of blood. “And until yesterday,” she continued, “I would have claimed that I hated them because of the Traitor and his nephew. Now I find that it was because I could not bear to remember Andoleyn...” She sat back and lowered her hands into her lap. In her cupped fingers, the blood-stained handkerchief lay like a holy relic. “You were always braver than I.”

**Author's Note:**

> What happened at Andoleyn:  
> Aytö's plan had been to evacuate the city in the face of the advancing enemy, but relations between his people and the Andoli were so fraught and hostile by then that things spiralled and it ended in a spate of violence and killings.
> 
> What is meant to happen after the story ends:  
> They manage to push back the foreign invader together and become one people. Neither of these are easy processes, obviously, but these are characters who take their adoptive bonds seriously. The legacy of Aytö's people is passed on in their Andoli families.
> 
> The idea of the Tenth Choir is taken from a Christian mystical tradition, but the religious beliefs of the characters in the story are not meant to directly reflect any historical religion.


End file.
